CRAWFORDSVILLE, Ind. — Plan on spending at least a couple of hours at Creekside Lodge if you dine there.

It's not that the food is that good, or the environment is warm and welcoming. It just takes that long because the service is so poor.

My wife and I expected — based on the name — Creekside Lodge to be a comfortable and pleasant dining experience overlooking a creek. But our expectations became a casualty to the reality of neglected customers, poor service, and a quality of food befitting the service we received.

Whatever expectations we had of a pleasant evening were tossed within the first 25 minutes, after which I got out of my chair, found a waitress, and asked why we'd been sitting for nearly half an hour without a waitress taking our order.

If this hadn't been an assignment for work, we would have left after 15 minutes of being ignored.

We got apologies and excuses when our waitress appeared again, but the service remained poor. It would be easy to blame the experience on one waitress, but other tables seemed to be neglected, too.

As an example of our experience: When the waitress brought our appetizers, she asked if we'd like horseradish sauce.

"Yes, please!" I replied with some eagerness in my voice. I love horseradish, and I believe in second chances for people who get off on the wrong foot.

It never came.

Before she brought our meals, she asked if I'd like some steak sauce or horseradish sauce when my steak came out.

"Horseradish sounds great," I said, but by this time, I wasn't holding my breath.

When she brought my steak — without the horseradish sauce — she asked if I wanted any steak sauce or — you guessed it, horseradish sauce.

Again, I asked for horseradish sauce, but I had no real expectation that I'd get it.

Asked three times. Never once received the horseradish sauce.

I forgot to ask for ketchup for the French fries. That's my mistake, so I looked for our waitress to get a bottle. I couldn't find her, so I took a bottle off a neighboring table after the customers left and before the table was bused.

Everyone is entitled to a bad day, but when there are that many waitresses floundering, it's also a management problem.

But back to the restaurant review.

The ambiance and charm of the lodge bodes well for the eatery, on the north end of Crawfordsville, if it can ever overcome its mountain of apparent shortcomings.

On the good side, our appetizers — spicy cheese balls and portobello mushrooms — were tasty, even without the horseradish sauce. And it only took 20 minutes to get them to our table after I complained about being ignored for 25 minutes. So crunching the numbers, we were at the restaurant for 45 minutes before they managed to get us our first bite of food.

Creekside Lodge's spicy cheese ball and fried portobella mushrooms were the high point of a very poor night at the Crawfordsville restaurant.(Photo: Ron Wilkins/Journal/Courier)

Oh, the French fries were good, too. So that's a positive.

On the just-OK part of the meal: My medium ribeye steak — sans horseradish sauce, of course — arrived more than an hour after being seated. It tasted fine, but was not medium and was not tender. We would have spent less money and received a better steak if we'd gone to a chain restaurant that flies the Texas flag over it or claims to be from Down Under. And I bet they have horseradish sauce, too.

My wife ordered the smothered chicken. Here's what she had to say about her meal:

Chicken? Dry.

Mashed potatoes? Dry.

Toppings of the smothered chicken? Tasty, but not enough to offset the dry chicken.

Her dinner roll was burnt — fully black — on the bottom. That's not an exaggeration. Burnt. Black.

She didn't even try it.

In fairness, I tried my dinner roll, which wasn't burnt. It had all the flavor and texture of corrugated cardboard.

At the end of the evening, a $6 glitch in our bill — in our favor — showed up after they ran my card. I pointed it out to the waitress, who assured me the lower amount was correct. It wasn't. Nevertheless, our waitress and her co-worker assured me it was fine after they'd stolen another quarter of an hour of my life.

It shouldn't take 15 minutes to pay a bill at any restaurant. Ever.

I tipped the waitress 15 percent on the higher amount, not that she earned it, but because this was a job assignment, and I'll be reimbursed for the expense.

A restaurant review is really just a snapshot in time, and like photographs, some are not flattering. But you can typically tell in those unflattering moments if what you're seeing is an anomaly.

Given we experienced Saturday, we won't be back.

Long story short: Creekside Lodge and its waitress got a grand total of $72 from us. The meal wasn't worth it, and the service wasn't worth 15 percent of the gross bill.